SERGIUS III, Pope. - Roman by origin, d. 15 April 911. Ordained subdeacon by Marinus I (882-84), deacon by Stephen V (885-91), bishop of Cere "per vim," Sergius assures us, by Formosus (ca. 893); after the Cadaver Synod of 897, in which he took an active part, he had himself reordained priest by Stephen VI, because he aspired to the papacy.
On the death of Theodore II (Dec. 897) he was elected pope together with John IX (v.), who managed to have himself consecrated first. Deprived of his see and condemned at the Roman Council of 898 (can. 8: Mansi XVIII, 226), he awaited his revenge in exile: in Jan. 904, with the support, it seems, of Alberic of Spoleto and his Roman friends, he overthrew the antipope Christopher and, considering his first election valid (he always regarded John IX and his successors as intruders), had himself consecrated on 29 Jan. Probably the authentic pope Leo V, imprisoned by the antipope Christopher, was still alive, so that the beginnings of his pontificate, not to mention his election, would not be legitimate; but he was afterward judged to be a true pope. One of his first acts was to abrogate the decisions taken by the Councils of Rome and Ravenna of 898 that rehabilitated Formosus and his ordinations, and he again proclaimed such ordinations null, also in order to justify his own transfer from the see of Cere to that of Rome; the decision was put into practice with a severity never seen until then: bishops, priests, deacons ordained by Formosus had either to be reordained or to abandon their posts, and it was even forbidden to call the aforesaid Pope a priest (cf. Jaffé-Wattenbach, n. 3534). His act aroused scandals and protests in Rome and outside it, but in the City everything was silenced by force. Of the grave unease that arose in the Church there are testimonies from the period, certainly impassioned but on the whole reliable, in the works of the Formosan priests Auxilius and Vulgarius (cf. E. Dümmler, Auxilius u. Vulgarius, Leipzig 1866, texts, p. 95 ff.), in the Invectiva in Roman, composed between 914 and 928 (PL 129, 823-38), and in the works of Liutprand of Cremona (Antapodosis, I, 29-31; II, 48; III, 43; ed. J. Becker, Hannover 1915, pp. 23, 58-59, 96). In 906 the emperor Leo appealed to Sergius against the patriarch Nicholas over the question of his fourth marriage; his legates granted him what he demanded. He continued the work of rebuilding the Lateran Basilica, which had collapsed in the time of Stephen VI, a work already begun by John IX. As Adrian I had done, he had his portrait reproduced on the Roman coins (cf. G. Ladner, I ritratti dei papi nell'antichità e nel Medioevo, I, Vatican City 1941, pp. 111, 159-61). He had close ties of friendship with the vestararius Theophylact and his wife Theodora. As for Sergius's relation with their daughter Marozia and his consequent paternity of John XI, Fedele believed he could exonerate him, but Duchesne, on the basis of the pontifical catalogues inserted in the Liber Pont., upheld its reality with good evidence. Sergius was buried in St. Peter's; the tomb is not preserved, but its eulogistic epitaph is known, which inspired Flodoard (De Christi triumphis, apud Italiam, XIII, 7: PL 135, 831) to trace the profile of S., which does not seem to correspond to what is known of the Pontiff's life.
Bibliography8 works
A. Pietro Fruta